No. 002 · 19 September 2026
Two thousand starlings. Each one watches only its seven nearest neighbours, and yet the sky moves as one body.
Move through the flock — you are the falcon.
About this piece
For a long time, models of flocking assumed a bird reacts to everything within a fixed distance. In 2008 a team in Rome filmed starling flocks in stereo over the city's rooftops, reconstructed thousands of individual birds in 3D, and found something else: each starling tracks a roughly fixed number of neighbours — about six or seven — however near or far they happen to be.
That small change matters. A rule based on distance falls apart when the flock stretches thin. A rule based on count doesn't, which is part of why a real murmuration can pull apart and snap back together without losing itself.
Every bird on this page follows three urges toward its nearest neighbours only: don't collide, fly the way they fly, stay close. Nothing coordinates the whole. When a falcon comes close, the nearest birds bolt and the panic passes from neighbour to neighbour, which is why you see a dark wave cross the flock faster than any single bird can fly.
Try setting Neighbours watched to 1 or 2 and watch the flock break into fragments. At 7 it holds together.